Informational pages, not product pages, are ranking for product-related keywords
-
My site sells products (+1000s) and we have a few pages about how-to's, tips, etc. But when you search for keywords that are relevant to the products, the guides show up as search results.
For example, if we search for "red widgets", the page for "how to make widgets" shows in the SERP and not the "red widgets" product page.
This doesn't make sense when most of the search results go to our guides and not to the product pages. How can I change this? Do I permanent remove these guides? Or rename the title, description? My guess is that other sites have linked to these guides so they are making our site more of a "guide" site as opposed to the products we sell.
Any advice/recommended would be appreciated.
-
We do have original content on each of the products. Just thinking this is more of external linking than anything else....
Thanks for the feedback.
-
Thanks Highland. Re:
1. Yes, the guide pages do have links to the product pages but looking at the stats, users go in, grab the info they need and leave. We have product images and links throughout the guides.
2. Each of our products do have good original long description.
3. This may be the solution - getting more links to the main product page.
Thanks for the input! Much appreciated!
-
It sounds as if the guides are getting search traffic so I wouldn't advise that you remove these pages. The reason your guides are getting this traffic is that they are out ranking your product pages (which are more than likely a lot lighter on content). They're probably out ranking your competitors project pages too.
My advice would be to understand the intent of the searches that are arriving on your guides etc. What are the search queries being used.
Once you understand what people are looking for then think about how you can improve your guides to entice people into your product content. They should form part of your conversion funnel. Make it clear that these are products you offer and are only a click away!
Then you need to track the conversion rate of people landing on your supporting content.
Remember that many of these people won't be interesting in buying (not immediately) but may come return in the future once they've finished their research. By making your content more memorable / helpful you'll stand a better chance of getting some of this longer-term custom.
Don't just strip out these pages - you're likely just to lose traffic...
Hope this helps.
-
Bots are to websites like ants are to sugar. They pick up content and gravitate towards it.
Gutting your site content is NOT a good idea. In fact, you'll find that removing your content pages will also remove the traffic! It sounds like you have a lot of naturally popular content but not a lot of conversions. So how do you capitalize?
- Add links to your product pages within the content. I mean, if you make AND sell the product, let people know that you sell the product to make money. Good internal linking structure is a necessity for the functioning of a website, let alone SEO. Don't just link either. Get a small block embedded in your content that shows a picture of the product, its price, and maybe an "Add to Cart" button.
- Beef up the content in your product pages. Naturally, product pages are anemic in content. Fix it!
- Get some links to your product pages. Use Open Site Explorer and find out where your links are now, and see if you can get the natural linkers to maybe plug your product page as well.
-
Hi there,
I have a question for you: what content do you have on the products pages?
I am asking this, because I have seen some websites which produced very cool "how to" articles and focused less on the product pages. I would focus more on creating better content on the product pages, then focusing how to draw back the existing rankings.
I hope that will help in some way!
Good luck,
Istvan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword every blog post?
Hi Should I be looking to keyword every blog post I write? Obviously the point in a blog for most of us is to draw in traffic so should I keyword research every blog post and use that as keyword? What if there is no keyword stats for the blog im writing? I guess I just use a keyword I make up anyway and hope people type it? Thanks Chris
Keyword Research | | mrcsleonard0 -
Weekly Keyword Ranking Report Question
Howdy folks! Okay so apologies for the n00b question, and additional apologies for going over ground that's potentially already been ploughed. I'm compiling a tally of the Weekly Keyword Ranking Report for a client. For the past three reports, the particular keyword I'm logging has remained in the same position. However the Change column shows it as having decreased in rank, by the same amount every week. If there has been no change in the ranking, I would have thought it would display as "Unchanged". As it stands, it shows up in the Declined category, and that seems odd to me. Anyone have an idea as to why this would be happening? Thanks for any input you can provide! Kevin
Keyword Research | | Treefrog_SEO0 -
Best Practices For Keyword Optimization
Hey currently building a new page on a clients site in the weight loss niche. The keywords he wants to rank for are the following: <colgroup><col width="198"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
Keyword Research | | monster99
| [fat burning foods] | 49500 |
| [foods that burn fat] | 22200 |
| [fat burning foods for women] | 2900 |
| [belly fat burning foods] | 2900 |
| [best fat burning foods] | 1900 |
| [fat burning foods for men] | 1900 |
| [list of fat burning foods] | 720 | His site is new, but he has excellent content production capabilities. My question is, in terms of optimizing the page (the title and url) for these keywords would you focus on the highest volume keyword. In this case the highest volume keyword is "fat burning foods" however is the most competitive and dominated by high domain authority sites (50+ vs. clients site which is around 30). Thus its highly unlikely he will rank for that keyword for quite a while. But for the keyword term "best fat burning foods" the competition is alot less in terms of DA and other factors but volume is smaller with 1900 hits a month. So would you optimize the page (the title and url) for "best fat burning food" or would you optimize thinking about the long-term and eventually ranking the keyword "fat burning foods". My thinking would be to optimize the page for "fat burning foods". And that the benefits of optimizing (url and title) for "best fat burning foods" isn't ideal for the long-run. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated. Cheers, Mark0 -
Keywords for fabrication (welding) company??
I've been tasked with finding the keywords for our website. The difficulty I'm finding is receiving help from the fabrication personal to suggest keywords. I'm not sure if its peoples imagination or if there's a general unwillingness. Can anyone make any suggestions here? Is there a fabrication or welding keyword database I can put to them and hopefully get their brains working? Or even a way to see what keywords our competitors use?
Keyword Research | | Resolver1010 -
How can I do to improve ranking for head keywords?
Hi guys, I'm currently working for an italian restautant finder web site http://www.cibando.com The site currently do not rank for any of the cityName pages eventhough all this pages received a B grade in the on-page report card by Seo Moz and have a great amount of internal links. This is an example of the pages I'm speaking about: http://www.cibando.com/ita/ristoranti/milano/milano As I can changeso little on this page, I'm thinking about creatinng a new cityName page having this URL http://www.cibando.com/ita/ristoranti-milano in which I add some text about the city and the restaurants people can have dinner at and add some link to the currently cityName page and categoryCuisine page. Is it a good idea? Do oyu have any suggestions? Any expert out there give an insight? Thanks in advance. Francesca
Keyword Research | | Francy0 -
Ranking Reports for New Keywords
I added new keywords to my campaign. They do appear in my ranking report. But I am not getting any ranking data on the new keywords. It looks like they are yet to be crawled. For my initial set of keywords, i see the specific rankings in each search engine and for some it says "not in the top 50." For the new ones all I see are zeros. Will the ranking data eventually appear?
Keyword Research | | dseevers0 -
Best keyword research tool
Okay, what is the BEST keyword research tool? I've heard all across the board, but I'm looking for preferrably a free tool, but just want to use one that can do competitive research, as well as find me a ton of long tail.
Keyword Research | | azguy0